May Emails

Learn what well completion and mineral rights are, plus learn what to look for when hiring an oil & gas sales person.

Transcript of Session –

Hey. It’s Mark LaCour. Let’s learn some more about the oil and gas industry.

[Music]

All right. It’s that time of the month where we answer e-mails. These are May e-mails.

First one. What are the traits I need to look for when hiring a salesperson for an oil and gas approach?

There’s a couple of things off the top of my head that’s real important. First thing, the person that you hire needs to know the industry. Next thing, he needs to unders – he or she needs to understand how to align your product or solution to the needs of the buyers in the oil and gas industry. And that, maybe even means that they need to be able to explain a problem that the oil and gas industry doesn’t even know it has.

They also need to be a consultative sales person, I cannot stress that more. There are so many people trying to sell in oil and gas that people shields go up automatically when they get sold to. You need a professional to come in and be able to consult with the client to help them solve their business needs.

And then, the next thing is probably as important is understand that the sales cycles in oil and gas are longer than any other vertical I know of. So you have to have somebody that understands how long the sales cycle takes, but also has a heightened time awareness. Understanding that the work that they do in July and October affects the money that the company makes the following May and June.

And then finally, you need to have somebody that really and truly understands how the oil and gas industry buys. The buying process in oil and gas is different than most of the verticals, between the number of decision makers, the global presence of the people making the buying decision, the skill of the procurement team. So understand how oil and gas industry buys is a trait that would really benefit you when you hire somebody.

Number two. What is well completion?

Well completion is really kind of a simple thing to understand. It’s basically making the well ready for production. So that means bringing the bottom of the hole up to whatever the specs or the term for that reservoir and then bringing in your production tube in any downhole tools you need. That is basically completion.

How do you manage to both prospect for new business and deliver what you sell? I don’t have enough time to do both. Help.

I struggle with that myself. The thing that works is to be able to organize your work weeks – your work days into weeks into months into a year. You need to calendar everything. So for instance, if you got plan to prospecting for new business, put in your calendar on Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 8:00 ‘till 3:00 that you’re prospecting for new business. Put everything in there that require some time and build your weeks out in a productive manner and stick to it and don’t try to multi-task.

If your calendar inter pops up and it’s time for you to cold call, don’t be answering e-mails, that’s a time waster. But that’s how I managed to actually both prospect for new business and service existing clients. But trust me, I know it can be rough.

Since you never answered the bench press question, how much can you deadlift?

What are mineral rights?

So this is an easy thing to understand if you’re in the industry and it’s a retorted thing if you’re outside the industry. Mineral rights are the rights to the minerals that are below the surface of the ground that you own.

So for instance, my house sits on a lot. I own the lot and in my case, I own the mineral rights, but the mineral rights and the ownership of the lot are not connected. I can sell or lease my mineral rights to somebody else. And that quite often happens and you put in layer of time in there and what happens is companies end up owning the mineral rights to large swatches of land and the owners that own that surface have no idea that they don’t own the mineral rights anymore. It sounds retorted, it’s actually a pretty good system.